Teachers' Evolving Conceptions of One-to-One Tutoring: A Three-Tiered Teaching Experiment

This article describes a three-tiered teaching experiment in which teachers were studied over a protracted period of time as they attempted to understand and improve their approaches to one-to-one tutoring. In a three-tiered teaching experiment model, emphasis is placed on (a) establishing a collaborative relationship between the research staff and the teachers, (b) careful choice of tasks for teachers and their students, (c) the development of “learning environments” for the study, and (d) the use of continuous and diverse dependent measures. The study documented the initial and revised strategies of teachers as they tutored children over a period of 10 weeks. Various indices of teacher change are reported, and some of the strengths and limitations of the methodology are discussed.